IDEAS Installation: Resonant Images – Maddie Butler, Cuyler Ballenger and ess whiteley

How do we communicate what cannot be seen? Doctors and patients engage with this question every day, translating physical and mental experience into shareable data. Resonant Images is an immersive installation that explores how medical imaging devices give form to bodily feeling. Bringing together moving image, sound and sculpture, this work unravels the complex relationships between technology, pain and the act of diagnosis.

Artist Bios:

Maddie Butler is an interdisciplinary artist originally from Minneapolis and now based in San Diego. Her work is concerned with the ways in which technology alters lived experience. Through sculpture, installation and video, she explores the emotional and bodily consequences of a society reliant on hyper-mediated communication. Her work has been shown at the CICA Experimental Film Festival (Gyeonggi-do, Korea), Bread & Salt (San Diego), PAPA Projects (St.Paul), Artscape (Baltimore) and the Satellite Art Show (Miami). She has received grants from the Suraj Israni Center for Cinematic Arts, the Russell Foundation and the Andy Warhol Foundation via Midway Contemporary Art. She received a BA from Yale University in 2015 and is currently in her final year of UCSD’s Visual Arts MFA program.

Cuyler Ballenger is a contemporary documentary filmmaker and video artist. He has a BA in Rhetoric and Film Studies from UC Berkeley and is currently pursuing an MFA in Visual Art from UCSD. His work takes up the specifics of his family in order to reveal collective truth. As such the process is a combination of journalistic exploration and a working-through of internal conflicts. 

ess whiteley is a genre-fluid composer, new media artist, and multi-instrumentalist. They are interested in cyborgian deep listening, the post-internet, computer hallucinations, haunted technologies, spirituality and more-than-human worlds in the context of virtually entangled life and the Chthulucene. Their work has been presented internationally at MATA (NYC), MA/IN Matera Intermedia Festival (Matera, Italy), Int-Act (Bangkok, Thailand), MANTIS (Manchester, UK), Dublin Music Current (Dublin, Ireland), TIER (Berlin, Germany) Echofluxx (Prague, Czech Republic) amongst others, and have received commissions from renowned ensembles such as Alarm Will Sound and Riot Ensemble. They were composer-in-residence at I-Park Foundation, Dublin Sound Lab, and the Visby International Composers Centre in Sweden, have had their music featured on publications like Pitchfork and The Wire and have toured as a performer multiple times across Europe, the UK, the US, and Canada. ess received their BM in Composition from McGill University in Montréal, MA in Composition from UC San Diego, and are currently a PhD Candidate in Composition at UC San Diego.

Visit ideas.ucsd.edu for more.